Re: NSMenu* and NSPopuUp* issues

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On Wednesday, April 9, 2003, at 07:34  am, Serg Stoyan wrote:

> Hello Willem,
>
> > Richard Frith-Macdonald <richard@brainstorm.co.uk> writes:
> >
> > > On Tuesday, April 8, 2003, at 11:24  am, David Ayers wrote:
> > >
> > > > I haven't looked into how it is broke, but please fix it, and then
> > > > ask all app maintainers to update thier nibs which they have saved
> > > > since it was broken, before they announce an official release, if
> > > > they use gnustep cvs.
> > >
> > > Assuming it actually is broken (I haven't checked personally) I
> > > emphatically agree.
> >
> > Yes, it is.  I noticed a while ago and in a private mail notified
> > Serg Stoyan.
>
>   I'll return horizontal menu code back.

That was not talking about horizontal menus ... it was referring to the 
bug in coding/decoding.

> > Although I think that most people are aware of the policy of
> > encoding format to my knowledge it is quite easy to be not
> > aware of it.
> > So to be fair, I think Serg just wasn't told and probably
> > not aware of the policy.
>
>   What policy?

Coding/decoding should *never* break backward compatibility.  Newer 
versions of the
library should always be able to decode archives created by older 
versions.
If this rule is not kept to, applications whose interfaces were created 
using one version
of the library won't work with the next version as the interface will 
fail to load from the
.gorm file!

Not really a policy so much as common sense ... it's not a good idea to 
break backwards
compatibilty at all, but in archiving it is particularly important as 
an error in one class will
stop the entire archive from being loaded, and if that archive 
represents the entire user
interface of an application then that disables the whole app!